


apotropaic

by arriviste



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-30
Updated: 2013-05-30
Packaged: 2017-12-13 10:38:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/823336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjolras claims France for his mother and for his lover and for his bride, but on this one night, perhaps, Grantaire sees Death at his shoulder: it is Death Enjolras is in love with, Death who whispers in his ear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	apotropaic

Grantaire has spent many afternoons at the Musain, many evenings at Corinthe. He drinks and rousts and argues; toasts to the pagan gods and the fall of the Orléanists; lies insensate under the tables; stares at Enjolras.

In truth, most of his time is spent staring at Enjolras. Enjolras is to him what Peter was to Christ: a firm point in a shaking world. Enjolras is a rock Grantaire can wreck himself upon. He might be shredded to ribbons or smashed to pulp and human flotsam, but Enjolras will endure, unbent and unbroken, stony and eternal.

This is what Grantaire tells himself, but he realises, one night at Corinthe, perhaps a week before the death of Lamarque, that this is simply a fiction he tells himself in his cups. It suits Grantaire to cling to the idea of Enjolras as something more than human, immortal; he tells himself this story like a child telling nursery-rhymes to the dark.

They are all children. Compared to their bright faces Grantaire feels a thousand years old and sick with sin. It might be a vision granted by absinthe and a touch of morphia, but watching from his corner he can see the shape of skulls beneath soft flesh, round cheeks, pathetic attempts at whiskers. Callow young men setting themselves up as sauntering citizens of the world with clumsy cravats and garish waistcoats, gravely discussing matters of state with the extreme seriousness of youth.

Enjolras is the youngest of all, save perhaps Jean Prouvaire. In the candlelight he looks all of seventeen; a child, a milkmaid. Rosy-cheeked and golden-curled like an infant who should be kept safe in the arms of his nurse; a pure image in enamel from a powder-pot, untouched by corruption. 

A child at the head of a column of children, and cruel in the way children are. Heartless when he sees the path clear ahead of him, heedless of human cost, and liberal in his spending of their lives. Grantaire does not wish to see that vein of cruelty in his idol, but it is there, winding through marble like a secret flaw, ready to crumble at the wrong touch of the sculptor's pick.

It is a vision from the absinthe, but as Enjolras declaims to rapt attention, Grantaire sees him piping them down a winding path into ruin, until the young men in his wake are nothing but skeletons shambling along in a dead man's dance, bright clothes rags in the wind. Enjolras claims France for his mother and for his lover and for his bride, but on this night Grantaire sees Death at his shoulder: it is Death Enjolras is in love with, Death who whispers in his ear. Mors, not Patria. 

He sends this vision to Hades with another drink, and then another. He drinks until he sees morning when he looks at Enjolras, not ending: until he sees what all the others see when Enjolras speaks. The dawn of enlightenment, of true égalité and true fraternité, the extension of this charmed circle of brothers to the wider world. If Bahorel can come of peasant stock to rub shoulders with scions of the decayed aristocracy, if Feuilly can spare time from his labour to swap philosophy with the idle children of the bourgeoisie – can this not be true for France as a whole? 

The Revolution began with beautiful words, then bathed in blood at the Temple and during the makeshift month of Thermidor; ended with willing surrender, baring its belly to the Directoire and then to the little Corsican, welcomed the Bourbons home and drew them to its breast again. Enjolras promises that this time, it will be different, and Grantaire tries to believe him; he who cannot dare believe in an unadulterated goodness, who cannot trust in a safe harbour or fixed mark –

He tries to believe, and tries to close his eyes to the fact that they are all going to die. Every single last one of them, who are in this very moment so alive. Marius in his threadbare black coat and with his enduring pride; Bossuet with his high peaked collar and bare pate. Combeferre, turning the pages of a book and making careful notes in the margins. Joly with the head of his cane pressed in the space between nostrils and upper lip, breathing in its embedded sal volatile to keep contagion away. Feuilly, earnest in attention, his clever hands briefly quiet in his lap. Bahorel, long legs crossed at the ankles, playing at dice against an invisible opponent. Courfeyrac beseeching Jehan's aid in penning odes to his latest grisette; surely Jehan will lend it, when he so enjoys composing sonnets for their own sake? How could he fail his brother in this, his most pressing and desperate hour of need?

That hour is still waiting on them, and it will ask more than a few scribbled lines comparing one's heart to a frail barque upon a stormy sea. It is already whispering at their ears and touching the bloom on their cheeks with its cold fingers, it is measuring out the breaths they take, counting down until their last. 

It is Enjolras, looking like something crafted in chryselephantine in the half-light; Grantaire tries to tell himself that it is Enjolras's beauty that draws his attention, his certainty and his adamantine soul that make his own supple waxen self want to cower at his feet.

If he drinks enough wine, he will be able to convince himself that those are the reasons he cannot look away, and not the transfixing, heart-liquefying power of the young and beautiful standing at the edge of death. It is that painful contradiction that makes the Dying Gaul resting on his shield so arresting, that makes so many stare at the perfect symmetry of the moth, circling the flame – 

Grantaire has always thought of himself as that moth, worshiping the light in another. It is terrifying to imagine for Enjolras that fragility, to see in him something short-lived and so doomed to die, drawn on and on to destruction.

Grantaire chooses not to see it. 

-

When Death comes for Enjolras he wears Grantaire's face; he comes with a sudden cry over the noise of the guns and the groans of the dying, a familiar countenance lit with unfamiliar conviction. Death comes for Enjolras in triumph, holding out a steady hand.


End file.
